Microsoft has announced that it has released the Visual Studio 2015 CTP 5 for download. If you have been following along recently, you will know that the Visual Studio team has been releasing updates at an extremely fast pace - so quickly, in fact, that you may have missed the last release that came out in October of last year.
For the first CTP (community technical preview) of 2015, Microsoft has added XAML language services, a new timeline tool, additional debugging tools, and some new features for ASP.net.
The new XAML language service is built on top of .net Compiler Platform "Roslyn" which the company says will give you a fast and reliable XAML editing experience that includes Intellisense.
The new Timeline tool helps to diagnose and inspect performance issues (shown above) with your WPF and Windows 8.1 applications. The tool provides a scenario-centric view of the resources that your application is using which you can view to help improve performance. This tool is located in the performance and diagnostic hub.
For the diagnostic tools, Microsoft has added these new features:
- Debugger Events (with IntelliTrace)
- Debugger Events (with IntelliTrace) gives you access to all Break, Output, and IntelliTrace events collected during your debugging session. The data is presented both as a timeline and as a tabular view. The two views are synchronized and can interact with each other.
- Memory Usage
- The Memory Usage tool allows you to monitor the memory usage of your app while you are debugging. You can also take and compare detailed snapshots of native and managed memory to analyze the cause of memory growth and memory leaks.
- CPU Usage
- The CPU Usage tool allows you to monitor the CPU usage of your application while you are debugging. (This tool replaces the CPU time PerfTip that was available in the Preview release of Visual Studio 2015.)
As with any pre-release software, you should avoid installing it on a production machine and it should be limited to testing purposes only. While this may be a later-stage release, it could still have bugs that could cause unwanted side-effects in a production environment.